School of Popular Music

How do you take a music school built on island community and bring it to a global city without losing what made it work?

For SOPM, the move to Expo City Dubai was a milestone and a chance to set the tone for the brand internationally. The brief was open. The space was a blank canvas. The ambition was to build one of the best music spaces anywhere in the world.

For Fitted, this was an exciting opportunity to translate culture, community and craft into a place that does real work for real people every day.

A music school is, before anything else, an acoustic problem. Get that wrong and nothing else matters.

We worked hand in hand with the client from concept to delivery, shaping the layout, resolving the acoustics and holding the brief together as the room count, the age range and the ambition grew.

Six larger teaching rooms and eight smaller ones were carved out of a single open shell, each one tuned for sound. Acoustic absorption was embedded into walls, floors, and ceilings as fabric. Layered LED lighting brings warmth and texture to spaces that are, by necessity, enclosed. SOPM TV, the brand’s internal broadcast network, runs through the building, so a student in Dubai can watch a student in Jersey perform and vice versa.

One space, designed to hold a two-year-old at a sensory class and a band rehearsing late on the same evening. Small details, accumulated. Comfort and calm, by design.

A flagship campus the teachers were excited to walk into before the first lesson was taught.

A space the client describes as one of the best music environments built anywhere in the world.

And, more quietly, the new international expression of an ethos built around three things: opportunity, community, confidence.